MoHack Mauritius 2017 - Local Hack Day

I'm a bit late on this post but here it is 😊, a small summary about MoHack Mauritius 2k17, a Local Hack Day hosted by GitHub at Collège du Saint-Esprit.

MoHack was organised by cyberstorm.mu on the 2nd of December 2017 as part of the 4th annual MLH Local Hack Day.

It's finally here! December 2nd, 2017 marks the 4th annual MLH Local Hack Day - a worldwide celebration of learning, building, and sharing. Over 275 communities around the world are hosting simultaneous 12 hour hackathons where developers, designers, and makers will join forces to bring their crazy ideas to life. ~ localhackday.mlh.io

While the event was due to start at 08:00, we got there 20 mins earlier. Hans who was attending the hackathon along with me bought a 1GB data plan since it was already announced beforehand that wifi connectivity might be very limited. Once we got there, we confirmed our presence by registering and we were then given a shirt for the event.

Getting ready

Git Basics

The opening of the event was a bit off schedule but after our hosts made sure that everyone had access to wifi and power for our laptops/PCs, the hackathon was smoothly kicked off by Kifah who was one of the organisers and speakers. He started by explaining the idea behind MoHack before transitioning into the basics of popular versioning software, Git.

Opening of MoHack

Kifah explaining the basics of git and how to apply a patch

Lunch
After an interactive tutorial surrounding the presentation on git, it was already time for lunch, which consisted of sandwiches, some sort of chocolate pie and deliciously refreshing lemonade(I think it was lemonade 🤣). Anyway, lunch was nice. We walked around and had some chit chat with other participants. That's when I met Nythiennzo and Bruno. I had actually met Nythiennzo before the event had started but we didn't get to speak that much until lunch.

Developing Extensions for Chrome
About an hour later, lunch is over and it's now Codarren's turn to take the stage. Before starting his presentation on Developing Extensions for Chrome, he spoke a bit about his contributions to open source projects and most importantly as a passionate coder with a particular liking for bug-hunting.

Codarren mentioning his notable contributions to Open Source Software and IETF hackathons

Codarren, having developed some extensions in the past, such as Week Ly, shared his experience with us by giving a throughout explanation of the structure of an extension and its essential component, which is the manifest.json file.

The manifest.json file explained using a pizza delivery guy as analogy

OSS contribution competition and Google Code-in
Once again, Kifah took the stage to announce a competition concerning contributing to Open Source Software on Github for university students. This consisted of solving issues from a handpicked list of software found on GitHub. These issues were then presented in the form of tasks and posted on the Bitrix24 web platform for easier management and collaboration. This involved following general contribution guidelines and writing quality code that would be used in production.

As for secondary students who were present, Kifah gave them more details about the Google code-in competition which is organised yearly by Google.

We then had a small tea-break where we enjoyed some snacks and lemonade while chatting with people around and looking at the task list.

End of Event
The event ended at around 16:30 with the distribution of sponsored goodies being the last item on the agenda. We got a few stickers, a poster and free .tech and .com domains. This was the first hackathon that I took part in and it was pretty fun. I had the opportunity to meet new people who share the same passion for technology and make friends. Looking forward to more hackathons next year!

Also, congratulations to @Nythiennzo for winning the university competition through his contributions to OSS! You can check out his post about the event here.